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Thursday, February 24, 2011

Hedge Fund Wonderboy Running Business From Mom's Basement

Just an average kid pursuing the American dream, of course. Being the son of a powerful Democrat senator sure doesn't hurt, either.

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden’s son has started a hedge fund in the basement of the former family home. That doesn’t mean his father is getting in on the ground floor.

Adam Wyden, 26, started the fund under the name ADW Capital Partners LP and runs it from the Washington house that now belongs to his mother, according to a private placement notice filed last month with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The fund is modeled after the investment partnership billionaire Warren Buffett ran in the 1950s and 1960s before acquiring Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Adam Wyden said in an interview.

Quite an ambitious young man. And it's nice to see that stereotype where only Republicans are known as the party of the rich imploded.

“Right now it’s just me,” Adam Wyden, 26, said when reached at his home in the Palisades neighborhood of Washington, from where he’s been running his $3 million fund since September. “I am the CEO, I am the secretary, and I am the chief marketing officer.”

Three million dollars? Nice to have connections.

In 2005, he landed a paid summer internship at D.E. Shaw & Co., working as an analyst on what he described as a $700 million long-short fund that bet on and against media, technology and telecommunications stocks.

“Not many college kids get to intern on a D.E. Shaw portfolio for the summer,” Brian Marshall, who ran the D.E. Shaw fund and now works as a senior analyst in the San Francisco office of investment bank Gleacher & Co., said in an interview.

Sure, not many college kids get those opportunities. I'm sure daddy's job in the Senate had nothing to do with it. Or the donations that then followed from Shaw.

David Shaw, who is no longer active in day-to-day operations, lent $100,000 to the Presidential Inauguration Committee for Bill Clinton in 1993, the Center for Public Integrity reported in 2000. He and other D.E. Shaw employees ranked third among hedge-fund donors last year with $569,049 in campaign contributions, 97 percent going to Democrats, according to OpenSecrets.org and the Center for Responsive Politics.

Ron Wyden received contributions totaling $9,600 from Shaw and his wife, Beth, during 2009, with each giving the maximum $4,800 that individuals are allowed to donate for any election cycle, OpenSecrets.org said. Shaw gave $5,000 last year to Holding Onto Oregon’s Priorities, a political action committee set up by Wyden to help other Democratic candidates, and $33,500 to the party’s senatorial and congressional campaign committees.

Nothing illegal here, I suppose. Just a good thing nobody is named Koch, or we'd really have some hot news.